Who are these tacky people?

I confess, I'm entirely transfixed by the idea of royalty. I'm most interested in what went on with powerful families of the past, especially when it came to their penchant for turning against each other, but the current incarnation of the reigning elite does hold a certain fascination. Jeremy Paxman, journalist with the BBC, has something of a royal hang up too. A familiar with some of the swankier circles of society, Paxman uses his access to navigate through the mystique to figure out just who these people are in his 'polite inquiry' On Royalty--and more importantly, whether the modern world really needs them.

Although he considers other nations' royal families (including the recently hired-yes, hired-royal family of Albania), Paxman, not surprisingly, pretty much sticks to The Royal Family: the Windors. The central premise about royalty is something of an oxymoron: how to appear constantly in the public eye, yet maintain enough of an exclusive aura so as not to clue the hoi polloi into the fact that really, there isn't that much that is terribly extraordinary about these people. To be sure, there have been some sovereigns who were gifted in statecraft or scholarship, but the relentless pursuit of hunting is a more accurate picture of a royal pasttime. In fact, they are terribly mundane in many ways (Paxman notes the heavily creased copies of Fredrick Forsyth novels in the Queen's library). But in describing Prince Charles, Paxman gets to the central tragedy of today's royalty: "The prince had consistently misunderstood or ignored a basic truth at the heart of the relationship between royalty and the people. He seemed to believe that his significance lay in what he believed and did. The truth was simply that his significance lay in who he was."

I use the word tragedy as that's the tone that finally emerges. It's perhaps odd to refer to a massively wealthy and priviledged group of people as tragic, but the added pressures of public scrutiny on an already disfunctional (and therefore normal) family, coupled with the expectation that they go through life without expressing the opinions that everyone else is entitled to makes for something of a tragic tale. On the public side, is the magic of royalty really worth the funds spent on maintaining their lifestyles? Paxman makes a well researched, readable argument, regardless of whether you agree with him or not.

Of course, the whole discussion of whether royalty is relevant today owes much of its origin to Princess Diana, possibly the most documented person of the latter twentieth century. Tina Brown, former editor of Tatler, The New Yorker and various other high brow glossys, adds her take to an already crowded field of Diana bios. I found The Diana Chronicles to be a tremendously frustrating book, although I stuck with it to the bitter end. Brown's journalistic take on Diana's life not surprisingly focuses primarily on the princess's manipulation of the press in manipulating her image--an obsession so vital to her that the Wales's marriage was less a menage a trois but a duel between Camilla et al versus Di and the entire press corps. All the well-known details are here, but Brown's portrayal of Diana suggests a much more desperate woman who used downright mean tactics to achieve the sort of stable life that she had always been denied. A convincing argument? Brown bases some of her conclusions on her own conjectures and disclosures which may never be proven definitively, but with a subject like Diana, such sources are the norm. It's as good an argument as any of the other Diana bios out there, at least for now.

But for a book based on one of the most photographed woman in the world, the almost total lack of images or plates is an especially frustrating one. Brown bases much of her argument on the manner Diana manipulated her image on specific photos, yet only a few black and white photos are given in endpages. I have a hard time understanding why Brown and Doubleday opted not to include a set of plates (price couldn't have been an issue, given the sure bestseller status). It's an inexplicable omission and one that ought to be corrected in future editions. Also, The Diana Chronicles is very long, and I was never allowed to forget in the course of 400+ pages that Tina Brown is a fabulous person who lives a fabulous life. Luncheons at the Four Seasons with the princess and reminiscences of state dinners are all very well and good to Brown's research, but I think she wouldn't have hurt her argument by cutting out the name-dropping.

Maybe I've proven part of Paxman's argument about needing the magic of royalty--after all, I've just slogged through 800 pages about them. Will the Royal Family ever lose their status? Judging by the popularity of Diana and her story, it's a fair guess that they'll remain an object of fascination for generations to come.